From above, the first Ferox’s signal finally lined up with his eyes as the beast smashed into the freeway traffic below him. The monster slammed into an SUV, knocking the vehicle across three lanes and into the nearest divider, where the car crumpled in around it. What immediately struck Jonathan as strange was that the Ferox, a Green, had attacked the oncoming traffic by ramming into it ass-first.
The Ferox began to claw its way out of the SUV’s collapsed remains just as Jonathan caught sight of a second figure shooting out over the freeway. The figure connected with the creature before it had time to plant its feet, a fist taking the Green on the jaw and spinning it back around. The Ferox tore through what remained of the SUV and broke through the divider.
The figure was smaller, human, female, and her face—Jonathan blinked—belonged to the woman from his driveway.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HE SHOULD HAVE moved, but Jonathan locked up when his mind started trying to connect the dots of the past few days with everything happening below him. Heyer had always made it seem as though these devices only functioned in men. Hadn’t he…? Or had Jonathan projected his own assumptions? Shaking his head, Jonathan grabbed the safety rail, preparing to jump the barrier and drop into the fray, but took a final look to decide where to position himself. He paused, the way Rylee moved leaving him in a humbled trance.
She fought the enemy inside the rapidly-widening gap of traffic that had begun after the Ferox crashed through the divider into the northbound lanes. The drivers were being forced to slam on their brakes at dangerously high speeds—screeching tires, crunching impacts, and shattering glass became ubiquitous background noise all around him.
Rylee flowed around the Ferox as though gravity was not a force that governed her but was an ally, working for her. She used her hands and legs as if they were interchangeable, seeming as comfortable in a handstand as Jonathan would be with both feet on the ground. She never held a stationary stance—she was always in motion.
In a maneuver that could not have lasted the length of two complete seconds, Rylee put her boot between the Green’s eyes just as her hands made contact with the freeway. Before the blow was delivered, it had appeared she was landing a handstand—yet she pushed back with her heel against the creature’s forehead. She used the leverage as a means to flip herself so that she was standing toe-to-toe with the beast—but she never stopped flowing through the movements; the toes of her foot touched ground and she was already dropping backward before her heel had planted. What looked like a fall backwards became the means to shift her weight onto one hand behind her. That hand became the center around which she swiveled her legs full-circle, sweeping the Ferox’s feet out from under it.
Rylee was already bounding away before the Ferox’s skull cracked against the road.
None of it seemed like the well-practiced steps of a memorized routine, and only a high-speed camera could have captured her at a moment precise enough to label her position a handstand. Rylee attacked as though movement was thoughtless, transcending the notion of any strike so simple it could be named.
The tactics played havoc with the Green’s instincts. Young and impatient, Rylee’s style was forcing him to fight from the center of a constantly moving circle, perpetually making him pivot to keep his back from being open to attack. The Green’s head bobbed in frantic motions to keep track of her, its tail whipping about in agitation, his patience becoming unhinged by a challenger that refused him a stationary target. She denied it the opportunity to launch an attack from a place of strength, keeping the creature off-balance and overextended with each attempt to hurt her. He swiped out at her with fists and tail, repeatedly finding that she was no longer there, and growing more and more reckless as she nickel-and-dimed its energy away.
The trance that had kept Jonathan watching her was shattered when a heavily loaded semi-truck transporting new cars joined the chorus of screeching tires in the southbound lanes. As the panicked driver tried to stop, his trailer swung out from behind the vehicle and jackknifed toward the divider. The tires left the ground, starting to tip over as it hit. Cargo broke free and dropped down over the divider, into the northbound lanes where Rylee’s attention was focused on the Ferox. She must have felt the crash, because she rushed to get out of harm’s way, but only had time to make a desperate dive past the Ferox as its tail swung for her. Though she managed to slip under the tail, the Ferox grabbed onto her ankle before she cleared its reach. Not wanting to be caught under the same falling car Rylee had been dodging, the Ferox spun away with Rylee’s momentum pulling him along, turning her into a tether ball.
Jonathan had only just started swearing at himself for standing still as the Ferox brought her back around and let loose, sending Rylee straight back at the danger she’d been avoiding. She crashed through the roof of a brand new Toyota Prius as the car hit ground against its driver side. The windows exploded and the roof collapsed in on her just as Jonathan shot himself off the edge of the overpass.
The Green never saw him coming, never had a clue—and Excali-bar came down like a hammer. The shaft made contact on its shoulder and drove the Ferox’s feet into the pavement like nails. Where it had stood, the road became rubble, and its knees crumpled. Jonathan set his footing behind the blind-sided Ferox, then spun his entire body, sweeping Excali-bar around and down, hard, until the staff slammed into the Green’s neck and put its skull into the pavement with enough force to punch another pothole into the freeway.
This was already over, and the Green was never going to see its executioner. Jonathan had already let himself go, let the killer rain down merciless blows until black blood was spilling onto the street. The Ferox’s limbs stopped moving, but that meant nothing to him. He never let up until the blood stopped pumping. Each blow landed like thunder.
Crash. Crash. Crash. Cra—
Jonathan felt a hand on his shoulder and his grip locked with Excali-bar poised over his head to hammer down again when he turned to see Rylee. His eyes caught in hers for a moment, and though she must have seen the feral emptiness of the killer staring back at her, she didn’t flinch. She held his gaze until the toxic smell of the creature’s blood hit his nose and drew him back to his senses. He blinked a few times, and she looked at him curiously, seeming able to tell when the light of thought resurfaced and quelled the instinct to keep smashing the creature into the pavement.
When she finally looked away, her eyes rose up to the staff still poised over his head. “It’s not getting any deader, Tibbs,” she said before she stepped away from him.
Reaching behind her back, down the collar of her jacket, Rylee pulled free a length of steel. Jonathan recognized the way it caught the light. The weapon looked as though it had been modeled off a piece of bamboo, but forged from the same alien steel as Excali-bar.
She plunged one end into a crack he’d made in the torso of the Green’s exterior and began prying the armor apart. For a moment, as she set to work, Jonathan found himself reflecting on the talent she had fought with, suddenly feeling like a thug with a spiffy crow bar. He wondered if Heyer forged these weapons for every person he implanted, or only those for whom he had longer-term plans. Rylee was too skilled, she had to be—
“You make such a damn mess of them,” she said, shaking her head. “More like sending a steamroller than an assassin.”
“It got the job done,” he said, though it came out more defensive than he’d intended.
“I wasn’t putting you down, Tibbs,” she said.
He didn’t give much more thought to whether the comment had been an insult, because as he looked down at the Ferox’s remains, he saw that Rylee had a point. Sure, this Green had been at a disadvantage, distracted by another opponent and never able to see him coming, but Jonathan had never killed a Ferox with so little effort. For the most part, he had taken this Green out with two strikes. That, and, as he studied the corpse, he saw that it was a black and slimy mess. The body looked as though it had been stepped on by a giant ra
ther than beaten to death with a staff. How had he suddenly become so much strong—
He felt the second signal shift position for the first time that evening.
“The other Ferox is through,” Rylee said, as though reading his mind. “We need to move.” She pulled her weapon up to create a wider gap into the Ferox’s torso. “Are you going to stare or are you going to help?”
Jonathan blinked, got out of his head, knelt beside her, and plunged his fist into the Ferox’s corpse. A few seconds later, he tore the stone free.
“Does Heyer know you’re here?” Jonathan asked, wiping the stone clean on his jeans. She had her hand out, seemed to expect him to give it to her. He put the stone in her palm. “Did he send you?”
She glowered at him as though he were being dense and zipped the stone into her jacket pocket. When Rylee saw he was still waiting for an answer, she exhaled, her features deepening painfully before she looked away. “I guess it was just too damn much to hope it would come back to you if we were activated again,” Rylee said. “If we have to have this conversation every time I see you, it’s gonna get old quick.”
He was distracted as he struggled to keep pace with her on the rooftops. Rylee’s footwork fell like raindrops, absent any apparent need of conscious effort, as Jonathan thudded along behind her. He had to hurdle a metal air conditioning box she’d casually cartwheeled over with the use of one hand a moment earlier. He was becoming acutely aware that he was only keeping up at all because she was slowing to accommodate him, and though it was ridiculous to feel competitive, the thought that he was slowing them down bothered him. So he tried to clear his head of all the questions and focus on what was in front of him.
Rylee was on course—-could clearly feel the second Ferox’s location as well as he could. What was novel to Jonathan now was that he could also feel her out in front of him because she was carrying the stone of the Ferox they had already dispatched.
“Do we have a plan?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Rylee said, as she cleared an alley separating two buildings. “Send it back before it kills one of us.”
“Right, but I’ve never fought as a team,” he said.
“It isn’t expecting two of us. We know where it is and have it outnumbered, and you hit harder than they do,” Rylee said. “So as long as you don’t miss and hit me, we should be fine. There’s your plan.”
There’s your plan? Jonathan frowned. “What if it’s a Red?” he asked.
Rylee stopped, coming to a crouch on the thin rim of the rooftop. Jonathan, not expecting the sudden halt, was forced to plant his front foot and slide across a few feet of gravel roofing to stop himself.
She looked at him with narrowed, questioning eyes. “You said something like that last time. What the hell difference does their skin color make?”
“I guess I didn’t explain last time?” he asked.
She answered the question with a raised eyebrow and a perceivable impatience.
No, obviously not, he thought. “The Greens are adolescent; the Reds, more mature. The younger ones are more rabid—fight with instinct more than strategy. The reds are older, more experienced, stronger. I’ve fought some that were in between phases, still going through a sort of puberty. Their behavior becomes more focused and calculating, their biology changes, they lose their tails, their ears take shape, and their eyes come close together—”
He saw her eyes narrowing further, watching him with suspicion as he shared what he knew.
“There aren’t any hard fast rules,” Jonathan said. “But if you get into it with a Red, and if it’s got a lot of scars, you need to be careful. Don’t underestimate him.”
“And you worked all this out on your own?” she asked.
Jonathan shook his head, “No, Mr. Fedora gave me the basics—experience proved him right.”
Without knowing anything about her, it seemed like his answer had pissed her off. She looked away from him, only for a moment. “I’ve only ever fought one Red. If it was smarter than the others, it didn’t live long enough to prove it,” she replied. “Don’t see what difference it makes now. It’s still two of us and one of him.”
She stood and jumped to the next rooftop, leaving Jonathan to wonder if he should be put at ease by her confidence or concerned by it. As they drew nearer, catching up to the signal’s movement, its location became clearer to him, a few floors below them in an adjacent building—the Pacific Place Mall. He expected Rylee to wait for him, but she dropped straight off the roof and down to the street.
“Great,” he said, slowing to a stop.
He came to the edge, knelt as Rylee landed below, and scanned the street. He didn’t see the enemy, only the wreckage confirming it had come this way. Civilians ran from the building and a crowd of spectators was forming on the outside due to the commotion. The police hadn’t responded yet, at least not in force. Jonathan felt Rylee rapidly approaching the entrance of the building. He looked down into the crowds, and couldn’t see her at first, until he saw a few bystanders knocked out of her way as she cleared a path to the mall.
The entrance she was headed for was still intact, but no Ferox would have left the doors in one piece if that was the way it entered. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for on a third floor window—a broken glass display where the Ferox had originally crashed through. He leaped from his rooftop, across the street, and entered through the broken window. If Rylee planned on a head-on assault, he could at least get behind it. After all, the tactic had worked out pretty well for him earlier that evening.
The shopping center was designed in a massive hollow oval, six stories tall with open space running down the center and stores lining the walls. Each floor was one large circular balcony connected by escalators. Jonathan ran out of the clothing store he’d found himself in, following the clear path of wreckage into the mall. There had been blood on the way in, but he had yet to find any bodies. As he reached the third floor balcony, he saw the safety railing had been crushed in where the beast must have used it as a launch pad.
He felt the Ferox above him while Rylee, moving fast, was coming toward him from below. When he looked over what was left of the railing, he saw her shooting past, ping-ponging her way to the top.
So much for surrounding it, he thought.
Looking down onto the concourse, he saw what Rylee must have already witnessed on entering from below, and understood if she was feeling a renewed haste. The Ferox’s trophies, arranged in a pile on the bottom floor—Jonathan hadn’t seen any bodies yet because it was collecting its kills. He’d seen the behavior a number of times, and it was one of the reasons he always tried to arrive as early as he could. Rapidly, he was finding himself on the same page as Rylee.
Their signals became a mixture of movement above him. Rylee and the Ferox were already exchanging blows.
Screw it, he thought as he sheathed Excali-bar and began backing up.
Running, he leaped off the balcony to one that was higher on the opposite side of the mall, grabbing for the rim and pushing off the outer wall to leap back in the direction of the fight above. On clearing the top floor’s rail, his attention was drawn immediately to the commotion coming from the Gordon Biersch Brewing Company. He dove to the floor as something large flew out of the restaurant’s front window, shot over him, and plummeted over the balcony. The booth, he realized, would have knocked him right back over the railing and dropped him on the bottom floor had he landed a moment later.
He looked inside to see Rylee moving around the beast like something out of a bad action movie. She used the walls, for a few steps at a time, as though they were as good as anywhere to run along. One look at the monster got him moving—the Red was easily the largest he’d ever seen. He freed Excali-bar as he got to his feet, and stepped inside just in time to see her land behind the beast and ram shoulder-first into its back. The two figures shot away from him, their bodies breaking through the exterior wall of what looked like the restaurant’s kitc
hen.
Then a gas line exploded.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HIS REFLEXES REACTED to the thunder of the explosion and he leaped sideways as hot light burst forth from the kitchen. The blast wave caught up to him while he was still midair and thrust him back. He collided with something solid that absorbed his momentum, and fell to the floor. When he hit, there was only a moment before the bright yellow glow of fire engulfed everything, the entire structure rumbling as he balled up, curling his arms over his face and clenching his eyes shut.
A mere human ear would have been ruptured by the assault to his eardrums. For Jonathan, the first clue he was still alive was the slow recession of the high-pitched whine that had followed. Sounds of the restaurant falling apart around him finally emerged and he opened his eyes, seeing how he’d managed to escape the brunt of the explosion.
He had landed between two massive metal cylindrical vats. The restaurant’s brewery contained a number of them, bolted to the floors and arranged in a line. He’d slammed into one, leaving a man-sized dent in its outer shell. The other vats between him and the explosion held in place against the blast, providing him some protection.
Water came pouring down on him from the building’s sprinkler system. The cold shocked him out of the muffled state left by the explosion, terror taking hold of him as soon as his mind cleared.
“Rylee!” Jonathan yelled, but hardly heard his own voice with the ringing in his ears.
The signals in his head—they had separated. The Ferox was hardly moving, still nearby, behind what remained of one of the kitchen’s walls. Rylee’s signal was further away. She was somewhere outside the building and at least a few stories down. He waited to feel her signal move, to give him a sign she’d survived.
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 12
